


Just Tonight We'll Throw It All Away

by MISHTAR



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Voldemort Wins, Angst I guess, Because it always ends up with crappy things like this one, Flintwood, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Past Relationship(s), This is the reason why I should try to sleep more and write less
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-07 12:23:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10360440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MISHTAR/pseuds/MISHTAR
Summary: “You’ve changed”“Yeah, Azkaban does that to you”The hatred in Wood’s eyes goes straight to his heart, but is stopped by the titanium armour he has built around it.





	

**Author's Note:**

> It's way too late to not be asleep right now, but here we are!  
> I hope you'll enjoy reading this... thing.  
> I don't even know if this work makes any sense, I wrote it in like 4 hours so feel free to tell me if there's something you don't understand / grammar mistakes, I'll try to fix it as soon as I find the time.

Voldemort is dead, but so is Potter. The death eaters still won the battle of Hogwarts and with that, the entire war. 

It’s been years since the war ended and of course purebloods are even less ready than ever to give up their privileges. 

It’s like nothing has changed since 1998. 

Purebloods are still the ones who make decisions, half-blood try to hide their muggle ancestors, claiming it was a dumb mistake than only happened once because of a blood traitor and muggle-borns are still at the very bottom of the pyramid.

But of course, everything has changed.

Muggle-borns are now gathered in the southern part of the big cities. No one goes there unless they want to stay there. Some half-bloods are known to live here to stay with their friends, because it’s what they believe in. No one can cross the line between the Northern and the Southern part without alerting the Ministry. 

Apart from some important death eaters, no one comes back from those ghettos, as they call them.

And if almost all muggle-borns are now parked there, those who fought during the war have a faith even worse than that, if that’s even possible.

They are being tracked down. All of them. Most of them are being killed right there, right now when they’re finally found. The whole world is looking for them. Even MACUSA has helped the British government by arresting two former members of the Order: Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnigan.

They’re not safe anywhere. Except maybe in France, but that’s another story.

For the luckiest of them, they die in a fight, after an avada kedavra hits them. It’s quick, it’s painless.

For the unlucky ones, Azkaban has been entirely renovated.

A big part of the wizarding world thought barbarism was going to end after the war, that there was going to be some kind of truce, that things were going to go back to normal, with the same good old hierarchy that had always existed.

How wrong they were. How innocent. How utopic that simple hope is.

The world has changed.

But behind the prison’s doors, things haven’t changed. 

Or maybe they have, but then they’re even worse than before. 

Some human civil rights activists have started to protest. But they’re rapidly silenced. And most of the time they won’t be able to speak ever again.

He’s been locked up for years now. The thing is, he’s been sentenced to life, just like all of his former friends. 

He’s supposed to die in there, but he’s already dead, isn’t he? He’s not supposed to see the sun ever again. There were windows, once, in the cells. It’s not the case anymore. Not a ray of sun, not a sound, only the ones he makes. He hasn’t heard a single voice except his own in years. Somehow, he just forgot how to speak. It’s only natural, he thinks. 

He doesn’t expect anyone to appear in his cell. And certainly not Blaise Zabini, of all people. He doesn’t like him, never did during his Hogwarts years, not going to now that he’s locked up in here because of people like him. 

The face he makes when he sees him just proves how much Wood must have changed. Not really a surprise though. 

“Wood”

His head hurts to hear a voice after all this time. Or maybe it’s only been months? He stopped counting after the two first weeks. He thought he was going to die in here, and who needs to know how old they are when they die? No one. You die, you just die, that’s all. Young or old, it’s always a waste. Or maybe not, he thinks as Zabini approaches.

And he doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know how anymore.

“You’re coming with me”

He raises an eyebrow. Great. He’s starting to hallucinate now.

“You’re free”

He doesn’t believe him at first but when without any courtesy Zabini grabs him by the arm, he barely has the strength to resist. He doesn’t even manage to resist, before Zabini handcuffs him with absolutely no delicacy. When the metal touches his skin, he knows this is real.

x x x x

He’s standing at the top of one of the highest buildings of the city. The Flints had always been the master of Leeds and the area around it. He has naturally been chosen to become the city’s mayor when his father died a few years earlier.

He’s watching the lights of the city beneath him, his mind elsewhere when the door of his office opens.

“Wood.”

He doesn’t even get a nod.

“You’ve changed”

“Yeah, Azkaban does that to you”

The hatred in Wood’s eyes goes straight to his heart, but is stopped by the titanium armour he has built around it.

Even his voice has changed, it’s raspier, deeper. His tone’s less passionate than it once was, it’s flat, it goes straight to the point, it’s not cold, but not burning either. It almost makes Flint sad.

“So I’ve heard”

They remain silent, looking at each other, waiting for the other to make a mistake they can use to hurt them. But that moment never comes.

He’s changed. He’s become slimmer, not that Wood had ever been very large. If a look could kill, he would be dead, but it doesn’t even hurt, it’s almost as he doesn’t notice it. He’s been cold for too long to care.

“You’ve changed too, for better or for worse I don’t really know”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ve made up your mind about it, stop lying”

“Let’s stop screwing around then, Wood”

Azkaban’s just a memory to him now. He still thinks about it at night, but he manages to block the thought of it most of the time. He’s been living with muggle-borns and some other rebels in the Southern Leeds Camp for two years now. Lately things have started to change. They’ve heard that there had been an uprising in the Southern London Camp, led by a young man, not older than Harry was when he had died. Other camps started to fight against their oppressors too. Leeds is one of them, and Wood is one of the faceless leaders of the movement along with Angelina and Alicia. 

He wants to remain anonymous. 

But that would be forgetting Flint.

Of course, Flint knows what he’s up to. He knows Wood lives in the ghetto of his city, actually he’s pretty sure the Gryffindor chose Leeds especially because the town was controlled by the Flints.

“What do you want?” he finally asks.

“I came to ask you for something,” Wood simply answers, his eyes burning with determination.

Flint can’t help but cock an eyebrow. It’s been years and he comes to request something from him?

“What makes you think that I’m going to… Even consider the option of giving anything to you?” 

He sighs and looks right back at Wood with a neutral but still icy glare 

“After fifteen years apart, you come here to ask me for something?” 

He can’t hide the disappointment in his voice. He wants to laugh, and to spit right in his face. Not that he had dared hope for something a little more personal coming from Wood. Not at all. He knows too well that Wood always wants to play the hero and that their history’s nothing compared to the greater good.

“Like you’d care if I was there for anything else” Wood grits his teeth and returns Flint’s glare. Because they’re just equally good at this game. “I wouldn’t have come here just to chat it’s too-”

“Fuck Wood why are you here? You could have been arrested!” He almost loses his words as he thinks about all the things that could have gone wrong. “Do you know what they did to Longbottom after he-”

People could trespass the border between North and South. It was possible, just strictly not permitted, and very harshly punished.

“Stop whatever you’ve started, Wood, you’re gonna end up dead or worse”

“I’d gladly return to Azkaban if it could make your little authoritarian system fall”

“Stop with the Gryffindor pride, we’re ready to kill you all if we must. But that’s not what I want”

“And what exactly do you want Flint?”

It’s a second, only a second, but it’s a second too much. A spark, here, in his cold eyes, it’s instantaneous and very oh so very brief. But count on Wood to see it.

“Help us.” 

Flint can only laugh at the demand. But he must be serious if he’s risked everything to get here. 

“The kids who live there. They’re just like we once were, you and me. You know that. I know you do”

“Things change”

“I know that” He does. More than anyone even. “But that doesn’t mean that once they’ve changed, we cannot change them again.”

“And you want me to help these… these…”

“These what?”

“Criminals” 

They’re always fighting, crime rate is higher than ever in the ghettos. Things are unstable there, dangerous even, because mudbloods do not know how to handle themselves. They’re just savages: that’s what children are now taught in the Northern part.

“They’re not criminals. They’re kids. Kids who are afraid and who know nothing but that you took everything from them and that if they want to survive, they’ll have to fight. Face it Flint, they’re criminals because you made them that way. You would have done the same thing if you were in their shoes. You would even have been the most dangerous one of them all.”

“Is that why you left? Because you wanted to be some kind of saviour to those kids? Their hero?”

“Mar-”

“Don’t call me that. You lost this privilege the day you decided to leave,” he hisses. And there, Wood can see it, the snake that lives within him, the true Slytherin that he is. Vicious, murderous, poisonous, always blaming the others instead of himself, always choosing the easy way.

“Fuck. Fuck. FUCK. Fuck you, fuck you, you bastard! You can’t blame me. YOU were the one who made me leave, and you know why? Of course you know why! I fought for the Order, I had nothing to do with you here. They’re not my people, and you know what Marcus? They’re not your people either!” 

That’s Wood. That’s the man Flint knows how to handle.

“Shut up, you know nothing, you don’t understand”

“It’s been thirty years, Flint, of course I had time to think and to understand”

Azkaban has not made him hateful, it only made him wiser, somehow. Flint is a survivor, and when he had had to choose, he chose the winning side.

“You didn’t care about me, you only cared about not being alone because you knew this world was not made for you. But now it’s time to choose on which side you’re on. I know you’re nothing like them. You chose them because you wanted to be on the winning side”

“And what makes you think that?” he spits, hurt, because Wood can still read him like he’s an open book. He just still knows him too well, and it reopens old-healed scars. 

“Look me in the eyes and tell me my mother is nothing but an animal”

Flint grits his teeth. He had met Mrs Wood, a long time ago, before the war, before they had to choose a side, before they had to choose between surviving and the one they loved. He sighs.

“I won’t try to stop you, I know it would be vain”

“Help us, Flint, help me. I don’t want to do it without you” I can’t, he wants to add, but he doesn’t. Anyway, Flint understands. Because even after all this time, he still knows him too fucking well. And it just hurts even more. He still cares.

“You know I could send you directly to Azkaban for entering this building?”

“But would you?”

Wood can only smirk when he catches the look on Flint’s face. It’s not very expressive. Nothing in Flint has ever been very expressive. Especially now that Pucey and himself are gone. He only stands a few inches from him, he can see every single wrinkle that was born on his skin. He has changed. 

For an instant, he believes Flint is going to do something he’s going to regret. He sees his hand flinch, like he represses some kind of instinct telling him to reach for Oliver. 

Their eyes never leave each other and even though he can’t read anything into them, he knows what they say. _I hate you, but please, I miss you so much._ He never forgave him for choosing Voldemort’s side during the war, but he knows he could, eventually. Flint sighs, and looks at their feet. 

“Mr Flint!”

And with that the link is broken. 

Zabini enters the room, pointing his wand at Wood who puts his hands up, not stopping looking at Flint.

Flint sighs as two much larger -but not necessarily stronger, Flint knows better- men than Zabini enter the room to arrest Wood. It’s quick and in less than two seconds, he’s kneeling on the floor, his eyes never leaving Flint.

“Think about it, Marcus please”

The simple use of his given name owes him a slap on the face from Zabini.

x x x x

They lead him to a dark cell. It’s not Azkaban but it still brings back unhappy memories. But after only what he thinks could be an hour or two, Zabini’s back.

“Someone paid for your crime”

At first, he panics. Paying for a crime usually means someone has been punished instead of him.

“They asked me to tell you that you owed them quite a lot of money now”

He doesn’t even have to ask to understand who paid to release him. But he doesn’t want to think about it. 

Yet, the meaning is clear. _He’s going to help as much as he can_. At that thought, Wood can’t help but smile a little.

Zabini makes them apparate in front of the border and finally disappears without another word. A few minutes after that, someone steps forward to stand next to him. Wood doesn’t have to turn his head to recognize him.

“You’re a little late,” he says. 

“Thirty years too late, yeah” Flint admits, in a whisper.

“Better late than ever”

“You’ll be back, won’t you?”

Their eyes meet and Oliver nods, a smirk spreading on his lips and for a second, Marcus considers the foolish idea of kissing him, right here, right now, just for the sake of it. Instead, he raises his hand to caress the Gryffindor’s cheek with his thumb. Oliver immediately puts his hand over his. It’s silent, but they both understand the meaning of the gesture. _Not now, but one day, eventually. I promise._

“I’ll be waiting for you, Ollie” _I will always be waiting for you._

“I expect you to”

Oliver smiles and Marcus does too. It feels weird, but it feels good, it’s been so long.

It’s been years since he’s been anything else than cold. And suddenly, he’s warm again. Only for a few seconds, but it’s enough to make him alive again, to make him hope that maybe, things are going to change.

And as he watches Oliver cross the border, he knows that, just like the Southern and Northern sides of the town he now owns, their lives are to be reunited. He doesn’t know how, when or at what cost, but he feels, he knows that eventually, it’s going to happen.

**Author's Note:**

> I really don't know how I ended up writing this thing, I had this image of two people in front of a border stuck in my head and Flintwood was like the first pair that crossed my mind. Anyway, hope you liked it! Feel free to point out any mistake, English is not my first language :)


End file.
